Moon Park

Moon Park is Mike Hoolihan’s birthplace and the setting of a return that brings childhood poverty and fear into the present. As she drives there to visit Phyllida Trounce, the neighborhood proves familiar in a way Phyllida’s attempted directions are not: Mike knows the streets because she grew up there, while the old fear, she realizes, has never entirely left.

Setting and Childhood

Mike lived in the poorer part of Moon Park, known as Crackertown. The dwellings she recalls are makeshift: wooden cartons extended with A-frames, or cinderblock shacks whose windows are cardboard. By the time she drives past again, the neighborhood has acquired the discarded materials of contemporary life—soaked plastic yard furniture, climbing frames, kiddie pools, and partly dismantled cars. Babies crawl among the cars’ exposed interiors, a detail that makes the landscape feel inhabited and precarious rather than merely abandoned.

Return and Recognition

On her way to see Phyllida, who is back in town and living in Moon Park, Mike travels across the river and out over Hillside. Phyllida had tried to direct her by phone but had become lost; Mike does not lose her way. Moon Park is not an unfamiliar destination to her but the place where she was born. Passing the old home, she senses that although everyone has moved on, her fear remains lodged in the crawlspace beneath it. The return therefore joins geographical recognition to an unresolved emotional past: the neighborhood has changed in visible ways, but memory has not simply moved on with its former residents.

Memory and Perspective

Moon Park also frames Mike’s impatience with Phyllida. She wonders whether the visit could have been handled by phone if Phyllida were less mentally unwell, then recognizes that her frustration may instead come from a desire to finish what she has set out to do. Her harsh generalization that the insane live elsewhere before coming home sits uneasily beside her recollection that Jennifer, whom she regarded as sane, also hated people she considered crazy. The scene places Mike’s judgments beside her own intimate history of fear, making Moon Park both a point of origin and a setting where the limits of easy divisions between the sane and the ill become visible.